Aaron Henriksen and Kevin Cavanaugh of the Legislative Budget Board summarized the introduced version of House Bill 1, the 2026–27 general appropriations bill, and walked members through major funding items and constitutional spending limits.

Henriksen said the HB1 introduced totals represent a modest all‑funds increase of $2.8 billion (about 0.8%) compared with 2024–25 on an all‑funds basis. He highlighted large components of the introduced bill: $51 billion identified for property tax relief (a combination of prior and proposed new relief), contingency funds for additional public education spending (including an $800 million increase to the golden penny yield and $4.85 billion in contingency education funding), and a proposed $3 billion in new property tax relief items including compression and contingent funding lines.

The draft HB1 contains substantial appropriations in several other areas. Henriksen identified $6.5 billion for border security operations to be spread across 13 state agencies, an increase of about $4.1 billion in all funds for Medicaid and CHIP primarily to cover caseload growth, $36.2 billion for highway planning, right‑of‑way acquisition, construction and maintenance, $86.3 million to fully fund backlog volunteer fire department grants at the Texas A&M Forest Service, and a range of higher education and health‑care contingencies (including an $850 million contingent endowment for Texas State Technical College and $1.3 billion to the Texas University Fund). He also listed proposed supplemental appropriations that will affect fiscal 2025, including a $1 billion one‑time legacy payment to the Employees Retirement System and $718.7 million for cross‑agency IT projects.

Henriksen closed with a statement of capacity under statutory and constitutional spending limits: the pay‑as‑you‑go limit showed about $11.6 billion of capacity, the tax‑spending limit about $4.8 billion (which he described as the controlling limit at the time of the presentation) and the consolidated general revenue limit about $9.8 billion. He reminded members that these numbers will be updated as the bill and revenue estimates evolve.

Ending: LBB staff offered to provide committee staff and members additional programmatic detail and technical assistance as bill drafting and appropriation negotiations proceed.